The invention pertains to systems for stowing missiles in a carrier aircraft and for transporting such individual missiles from their stowed position to a launching position from which the individual missiles are launched.
A variety of missile stowing and launching systems have previously been developed for aircraft carried weaponry and other projectiles. In the design of such known systems, there has been an effort to accommodate at least two principal design goals, namely, payload density and missile selectivity. The former design objective maximizes the strike capacity for each carrier aircraft and the latter factor affords the option of selecting individual missiles according to such specifications as explosive-type, guidance/propulsion characteristics and range. These options enable missiles to be selected and matched according to the nature of particular targets.
The above design objectives and others such as rate of sequential launching, adaptability to existing missile bay configurations, and ready access for maintenance, have resulted in design tradeoffs that have significantly compromised one or more of the above sought after features or design goals.
The tradeoff between payload density (and hence strike capacity) versus missile selectivity is especially severe in connection with attempts to devise a stowage and launching apparatus for certain missile shapes, such as those configured for transonic flight which employ a basic delta or delta-wafer configuration. The delta-shaped missile does not lend itself to some of the more common stowing and launching arrangements. In this respect, the present invention, as disclosed herein, has been found particularly advantageous for delta-shaped missiles, although it will be appreciated from the detailed description set forth hereinafter, that the invention is also useful for a wide variety of missile types and configurations.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide a missile stowing and launching system, suitable for being mounted in a carrier aircraft, that uniquely accommodates a high density missile payload while at the same time affords unlimited missile selectivity from among all of the stowed missiles.
Another object of the invention is to maximize the payload density and afford the unlimited missile selectivity as stated in the above object, in a system that is compatible with delta and delta-wafer shaped missiles.
A further object of the invention is to provide such a missile stowage and launcher system that has the further desirable characteristics of accommodating relatively easy access to each of the stowed missiles for maintenance, when the carrier aircraft is grounded, and that has a configuration which is compatible with, and can be retrofitted to the missile bays in many existing carrier aircraft.
Still another object is to provide a missile stowage and launcher system having the above-mentioned objectives of accommodating a high density payload and unlimited missile selectivity, together with the further capability of a rapid sequential launching rate.